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SOURCE: “I Know When One Is Dead, and When One Lives,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LXV, 1981, pp. 171-89.
In the following essay, originally presented in 1979, Craik reviews the final scene in King Lear together with scenes in other plays where Shakespeare treats life and death with dramatic ambiguity.
I am very grateful to the British Academy for inviting me to deliver this lecture. For my title I am indebted, obviously, to Shakespeare himself, but it was a colleague of mine at the University of Durham, Dr Derek Todd, who provided the stimulus. In his book I Am Not Prince Hamlet Dr Todd writes as follows:
‘I know when one is dead, and when one lives’, says Lear as he carries in Cordelia: a statement which turns out to be strangely false, for he alternates several times between believing her alive and believing her dead.1
Dr...
This section contains 7,587 words (approx. 26 pages at 300 words per page) |
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